UK .googlemail accounts changing to .gmail – BEWARE!

UK users of Google’s mail service, Google Mail, have until now been required to use an address that ends with ‘.googlemail’, rather than the abreviated ‘.gmail’ as a result of a legal dispute. However, this was resolved by Google earlier this year and users have now been given the option to switch to a ‘gmail’. Unfortunately, this has led to problems for people using Android devices.

In particular, we’ve heard its causing problems with the HTC Desire. When you power up an Android device for the first time, you are asked to enter a Google account to sync contacts and calendar with. If you entered a ‘.googlemail’ account originally when powering up your Desire, but have now changed your email account to a .gmail address, you are likely to have problems using features associated with Google Mail. It is suggested that the only way to solve the problem is to do a hard reset of the device and start over again.

Over at Andronica they have published some info on how to resolve the problem, although it seems this may not necessarily apply to the Desire:

Changing the account back to @googlemail fixes the issue temporarily, but that doesn’t solve the root problem. The Google help forums have had several people searching for a fix that didn’t require wiping their phone data and starting over.

Thankfully, Androinica has clever readers who typically discover a workaround for these sorts of things. We received a tip from loyal reader BegottenSun who pointed out that this problem can usually be solved by doing a quick cache clear. Here are the directions sent to us via Begottensun:

1. Press the Menu button and navigate to Settings >  Applications > Manage Applications
2. Select Gmail and then press the “Clear Data” button
3. Go back and choose Gmail Storage, and then press Clear Data
4. Go back and choose Google Apps, and then press Clear Cache

Go to Gmail, you will be asked to sign in. Sign in using “name@gmail.com” instead of “name@googlemail.com” and everything will sign in properly! NO Switch back to googlemail required

Our advice is not to switch to ‘.googlemail’ unless your willing to perform a factory reset of the device. Once HTC release a ROM update for the Desire, a factory reset will be required anyway so perhaps it would be best to wait for this before changing accounts.